Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Fischer and Steve Kozyk.
Rachel and Steve, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
For over two years, we conducted market research, crafted financials and a business plan while saving up our money to open our brewery. After locating a space for the brewery in Kearny Mesa, we took the leap and signed a lease in 2014. Our official grand opening, after 6 months of building the brewery and obtaining the required licenses and permits to brew beer, was in March 2015.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Starting a business is probably never a smooth road for anyone, especially for businesses that are bootstrap funded. We started Kilowatt with the personal savings of our owners and are funding our growth and expansion in the same way with our profits, a lot of hard work, and perseverance. You always hear that starting a business will be exponentially more difficult than you can ever imagine. However, you never realize just how much work goes into starting a small business until you do actually do it. Specific struggles that we have encountered mostly relate to competing with breweries that are larger than us (which are most of them!) who can manufacture their beer at a much lower cost than we can produce our beer. Since our profit margins are smaller, we have focused on selling our beer through our retail tasting rooms, rather than wholesale distribution which allows us to maximize our margins.
Kilowatt Brewing – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Kilowatt Brewing is a small, local brewery in San Diego. Located in the San Diego neighborhoods of Kearny Mesa and Ocean Beach, Kilowatt currently handcrafts its beers in small 3 barrel batches under the close personal attention of our brewer. We are known for having very large tap lists with a wide variety of beers, featuring unique ingredients and combinations. Examples of our beers include our Chocolate Macadamia Stout, Passion Fruit Green Tea Ale, Coconut Chai Porter, Guava 250 kWh IPA, and Bourbon Vanilla Oak Amber, just to name a few.
Our tasting rooms are not your typical taprooms. We really strive to create a unique experience for our customers. Our tasting rooms features creative lighting, interactive art, giant games (giant Jenga, giant Connect4, giant Lite Brite, Giant Shoot the Moon) and rotating artwork by local artists. Custom programmed LED lighting allows us to change the lighting color and mood in real-time.
Our Ocean Beach Tasting Room features a blacklight lounge that includes both permanent and rotating black light art installations. We always have a supply of 3D glasses available so the customers can enjoy the lounge and get the full 3D blacklight experience.
Our tasting rooms are collaborative, creative spaces, where we rotate in new artwork from local artists, providing new experiences for returning customers. Allowing the community to experience unique, local art alongside unique, local craft beer.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
We will be celebrating the 1-year anniversary of the Ocean Beach Tasting Room and the 3 Year Anniversary for the brewery in January and March 2018, respectively, the success of our tasting rooms has allowed us to focus on expanding the size of our brew house to allow us to more efficiently accommodate our demand. As a result, we are installing a 7BBL brew house with 15 BBL fermenters this month. Even with this expansion, we are still a very, very small brewery, but it feels amazing to see our accomplishments, hard work, and passion fund our growth.
Contact Info:
- Address: Brewery & Tasting Room: 7576 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., San Diego, CA 92111
Tasting Room: 1875 Cable Street, San Diego, CA 92107 - Website: www.kilowatt.beer
- Phone: 8587153998
- Email: beer@kilowatt.beer
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kilowattbeer/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kilowattbeer/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kilowattbeer
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/kilowatt-brewing-san-diego
Image Credit:
John Cocozza Photography
William Prickett (Hoplight Social)
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